A deathly silence

12 October 1998
With the republishing of Jessica Mitford's classic American Way of Death, Thomas Lynch considers the book's impact, and its author's poignant reticence over the deaths that concerned her most - those of two of her children

JESSICA Mitford changed my life. I was 15, working nights and weekends at my father's funeral home, greeting mourners at the door and moving flowers and caskets, when The American Way of Death was first published in 1963.

My father bought it and said I should read it. At first it seemed about funereal fashion - the boxes and cosmetics, the unctuous euphemisms of undertakers, their "beautiful memory pictures" and "grief therapy", the laughable sales pitches of cemetery moguls. Mitford took them all to task. In a culture that did not discuss these things, her willingness to do so was new. To an enterprise shrouded in darkness she brought her curiosity, wry humour and wary indignation. So much of what we do when someone dies has been shaped by her.

I went about my father's business. In the middle of a small town in middle America, I've been doing funerals for 25 years. Our enterprise is average in most ways.We do the average number of funerals, our sales are average, and so are our mortgage payments. My neighbours regard me with average ambivalence. I am at once a kind taxman - collecting the duty on broken hearts - and "the last one to let you down," as a local joker puts it. When folks call in the middle of the night, we always answer. The news they call with is never good. And when someone we love dies we go towards the rough edges of the emotional register, the mountains and deserts of the soul's landscape, the borders of blinking voids of being and ceasing to be, where everything is changed, as verbs that change their tenses in a heartbeat or a breath.

Whether or not they've ever read it, most of the families I've dealt with have in their heads a version of "Decca" Mitford's book. It has entered the conventional wisdom. Last summer I secured an introduction to Jessica's daughter Constancia Romilly (whom Mitford nicknamed "Dinky") and Benjamin ("Benji") Treuhaft, who is Dinky's half-brother and Jessica's youngest son.

I had questions I wanted to put to them about The American Way of Death Revisited, a new edition of their mother's book (which she had been working on at the time of her death two summers before, and which has since been completed by some of her admirers), and about her life and times, so I invited them all to dinner in Manhattan's East Village. "You should have seen my mother's funeral," Benjamin said. "Everybody loved it! They really, really liked it because there was no gloom." I asked if they thought their mother would approve, what with her celebrated preferences for simplicity and cost controls. Her body had been cremated, the ashes scattered in the Pacific, but after that things got pretty elaborate. "The person who dies doesn't get to say anything about their funeral," Dinky said. "No matter how many books they might have written about it. The funeral is for the people who are left behind. They get to do whatever they want. No matter what the person wanted. So I used to tell Jessica, we're going to do whatever we wantÖ we're going to have a New Orleans Band."

Jessica Mitford was born in the cotswolds in 1917. her parents were robustly right-wing aristocrats, one sister became a Nazi, another married Sir Oswald Mosley. Jessica rebelled by becoming what another sister, the novelist Nancy Mitford, called "a ballroom Communist". In 1937 Jessica ran off with a cousin, Esmond Romilly (a nephew of Churchill), to fight the fascists in Spain. They married. Her father disowned her. They returned to London, then left for America, where they worked in Washington and Florida. Esmond was killed in action during the Second World War, leaving her with the infant Constancia, and a job with the Office of Price Administration - "as close to the front-line of the war against fascism as anything in Washington," as she wrote in her second autobiography, A Fine Old Conflict. There she met Bob Treuhaft, an attorney. That he was handsome and brilliant and Jewish and from the Bronx, and well to the left, and that her father could be counted on to disapprove, all made the match the more dear. They married, settled in California, joined the Communist Party. He worked for the trade unions. They had two sons: Nicholas, then Benjamin.

In 1954 Nicholas, ten, was killed when a bus hit him as he was cycling near their home in Oakland. "We went dysfunctional," his siblings say now. "We couldn't talk to each other. We never talked about it again. It was as if Nicky was eradicated from the family." The dead boy's sister wore a red pleated dress to his funeral. She remembers that, and people milling around and a sense of total despair. "It's all blocked out," the younger brother says when asked what he recalls. Benjamin was seven and Constancia 13 when Nicky was killed.

Jessica had been through the hell of losing a child before, in London before the War. Her first daughter, Julia, died aged four months, of a fever. Jessica and Esmond chose the geographical cure. "The day after the baby was buried," she wrote, in the sad solitary paragraph she devoted to her daughter's death in Hons and Rebels (her first autobiography), "we left for Corsica. There we lived for three months in the welcome unreality of a foreign town, shielded by distance from the sympathy of friends."

As a Communist, Benjamin and Constancia explain, Jessica did not believe in "that pie in the sky when you die thing" and, as a product of her class and times, had no faith in psychology. She embraced the unreality of California, and there was a ban on talk within the family. "We did our best," recalls Dinky, "but we didn't do very well."

"To trace the origins of this book," writes Jessica in the introduction to Revisited, "my husband, Bob Treuhaft, got fired up on the subject of the funeral industry in the mid-to-late Fifties." Jessica joined in, mounting what she calls her "frontal assault on one of the seamier manifestations of American capitalism". Her first article on the subject, called "St Peter Don't Call Me", was published in 1958. "The undertakers," she says, "were an easy target," and the topic allowed her to "give full rein to my subversive nature".

But it was more to do with dollars than with death. What bothered her was the American way of business. Perhaps Evelyn Waugh, no sympathetic witness for the dismal trades, had it right when he wrote, "I sniff in Miss Mitford's jolly bookÖ a resentment that anyone at all (except presumably writers) should make any money out of anything. The presence of death makes the activities of undertakers more laughable, but I feel she would have the same scorn for hatters or restaurateurs."

But there was, a fundamental element about funerals that Jessica truly abhorred. For all her carping about boxes and embalming, it was the bodies of the dead that bothered her, those unwelcome realities whose stillness leaves us dumbstruck, bereft of punchlines. It is largely on her advice that we have, in the decades since her book was first published, become the first of our species to have our dead "disappeared", like any other nuisance or embarrassment, assisted by mobile phone and credit card, as if we could deal with death by not dealing with the dead. What put her off most about the American way of death was our tendency to mark our losses and grieve for our dead in ways that - for intensely personal reasons, as it turns out - she could never understand.

The American Way of Birth, which was published six years ago (four years before her death), was pretty much ignored, to judge by its sales. But The American Way of Death has gone through printing after printing. The new revised edition articulates her outrage at the marketing of cremation services and products, the pre-need sales scams of cemeteries and telemarketers, the "bottom-line" mentality of new corporate giants buying up family-owned funeral homes around the globe.

A new chapter details the hard-sell activities of Service Corporation International (SCI), the Houston-based conglomerate which hides behind the established names of the old firms it is acquiring on several continents. It now handles one in eight deaths in Britain, one in five in America, and enjoys a virtual monopoly in Australia. "Of all the changes in the funeral scene over the last decades," writes Mitford, "easily the most significant is the emergence of monopolies in what the trade is pleased to call the 'death care' industry."

She is right. Economies of scale that trade on "bigger is better" models of merger and acquisition often leave the consumer out in the cold. But she is blind to the coincidence of big-business invasions (which she abhors) and big-government involvement (which she pioneered) in what was, until her book, a comparatively small market.

Likewise, Mitford fails to notice that cremation, pre-need and cost-cutting were notions the marketplace learnt from her. Ever ready to trade custom for convenience, to discount meaning for cost-efficiency, she fails to recognise her own hand in shaping the future of a "death-care" marketplace that has been "Mitfordised". The sacred has given way to the secular, love to logic, sadness to celebration, as funerals have become "thanksgiving services". Jessica, one suspects, would approve.

Indeed, the impact of The American Way of Death on the custom and culture of funeral practices in America is the very reason why the revised edition fails to seem much more than old news retold and resold. Folks still bury and burn their dead with ceremony, and Jessica Mitford still thinks it costs too much. She has discovered that funeral directors sell caskets for more than they pay for them. She has probed their trade journals and infiltrated their conventions and found them unopposed to profit. And she reveals that they have merchandising schemes to induce the consumer to buy what they are selling.

jessica mitford planned to call the revised edition Death Warmed Over, but Decca Warmed Over is nearer the mark. Finished by a committee of Decca-come-latelies and Jessica-wannabes, it retains her biases but lacks her style, though there are some laughs to be had, particularly over the mortuary-speak she turned up in the catalogues: "The Practical Burial Footwear Company" and the "Futurama - the casket styled for the future".

"Decca would do anything for a laugh," Dinky says. She knew that a good laugh attracts company more than a good cry, and whistling past the graveyard sells better than going in. And going in is something she could never do. Because the dead are there, beyond all efforts to obscure them with humour or harangue. They are there alone and must be dealt with. One can only speculate on what she'd think of the multi-media intercontinental extravaganzas in California and London that marked her death. Committees were formed and money was raised and halls were engaged and music selected and speakers arranged, and a good cause (Benjamin's "Send a Piana to Havana" project) named for memorial contributions.

In London the Lyric Theatre was rented at a cost, one reckons, exponentially higher than the average funeral. But for the hundreds who attended, from Maya Angelou and Salman Rushdie to her husband and daughter and son, the services had a meaning and comfort beyond the invoices. For this was a woman who was admired and loved, for all her passions and causes and foibles. To have done nothing would have been simpler, easier and cheaper, but something had to be done. Not because it matters to the dead, but because the dead matter to the living.

Sadly, Jessica hadn't the range for such contemplations. A writer who offers two books called The American Way of Death and never mentions the names of her two dead children can be called quirky or eccentric or private or brave. But a woman who writes two volumes of autobiography and never discusses these facts can only be called sad and silent. After all the good-humoured banter, it is that silence that nearly deafens now.